The Christology of the Gospel  
1. The Gospel not a Biography.
 
Once more we fall back upon our main position. The Evangelist is writing a spiritual Gospel, and his whole procedure is dominated by that one fact. His object is to set forth Christ as Divine, not only as Messiah but as Son of God, as an object of faith which brings life to the believer.
It follows that all criticism which does not take account of this—and how large a part of the strictures upon the Gospel does not take account of it!—is really wide of the mark. M. Loisy, for instance, brings a long indictment against the Gospel for not containing things that it never professed to contain. It never professed to be a complete picture of the Life of the Lord. It never professed to show Him in a variety of human relationships. It never professed to give specimens of His ethical teaching simply as such. It did not profess to illustrate, and it does not illustrate, even the lower side of those activities that might be called specially divine, as (e. g.) the casting out of demons.
The Gospel is written upon the highest plane throughout. It seeks to answer the question who it was that appeared upon earth, and suffered on 206Calvary, and rose from the dead and left disciples who revered and adored Him. And this Evangelist takes a flight beyond his fellows inasmuch as he asks the question who Christ was in His essential nature: What was the meaning—not merely the local but the cosmical meaning—of this great theophany?
It is not surprising if in the pursuit of this object the Evangelist has laid himself open to the charge of being partial or onesided. Those who use such terms are really, as we have seen, judging by the standard of the modern biography, which is out of place. The Gospel is, admittedly and deliberately, not an attempt to set forth the whole of a life, but just a selection of scenes, a selection made with a view to a limited and sharply-defined purpose. The complaint is made that it is monotonous, and the complaint is not without reason. The monotony was involved, we might say, from the outset in the concentration of aim which the writer himself acknowledges. And in addition to this it is characteristic of the writer that his thought is of the type which revolves more than it progresses. The picture has not that lifelike effect which is given by the setting of a single figure in a variety of circumstances. The variety of circumstance was included among those bodily or external aspects (τ? σωματικ?) which the writer considered to have been sufficiently treated by his predecessors. He described for himself a narrower circle. And it was because he kept within that circle, because he goes on striking the same chord, that we receive the impression of repetition and monotony. Perhaps the intensity of the 207effect makes up for its want of extension. But at any rate the Evangelist was within his rights in choosing his own programme, and we must not blame him for doing what he undertook to do.
We may blame him, however, if within his self-chosen limits the picture that he has drawn for us is misleading. That is the central point which we must now go on to test. The object of the Gospel would be called in modern technical language to exhibit a Christology. Is that Christology true? Does it satisfy the tests that we are able to apply to it? Can we find a suitable place for it in the total conception that we form of the Apostolic Age? Does it belong to the Apostolic Age at all; or must we, to understand it, come down below the time of the Apostles? To answer these questions we must compare the Christology of the Fourth Gospel with that of the other Apostolic writings, and more particularly with that of the Synoptic Gospels, of St. Paul, and of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
It does not take us long to see that the Christology of the Fourth Gospel has the closest affinity with this group of Epistles—we may say, with the leading Epistles of St. Paul and with that other interesting Epistle of which we know, perhaps, or partly know, the readers but do not know the author. It is worth while to bring in this because the unmistakable quotation from it in Clement of Rome proves it to belong to the Apostolic Age.
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2. The Christology of St. John compared with that of St. Paul and of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
 
The meeting-point of all the authorities just mentioned—indeed we might say the focus and centre of the whole New Testament—is the title ‘Son of God.’ But whereas the Synoptic Gospels work up to this title, St. John with St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews work downwards or onwards from it. What I mean is this. The Synoptic Gospels show us how, through the conception of the Messiah and the titles equivalent to it, by degrees a point was reached at which the faith of the disciples found its most adequate expression in the name ‘Son of God.’ The culminating point is of course St. Peter’s confession represented at its fullest in the form adopted by St. Matthew, ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God’ (Matt. xvi. 16). In the Synoptic Gospels, and we may say also in the historic order of events, this confession is a climax, gradually reached; and we are allowed to see the process by which it was reached. ‘Son of God’ is the highest of all the equivalents for ‘Messiah.’ And in the Synoptic Gospels we have unrolled before us, wonderfully preserved by a remarkable and we may say truly providential accuracy of reproduction with hardly the consciousness of a guiding idea, the historic evolution, spread over the whole of the public ministry, by which at its end the little knot of disciples settled upon this term as the best and amplest expression of its belief in its Master. 209We have seen that the Fourth Gospel is by no means wanting in traces of this evolution. But these too are traces, preserved incidentally and almost accidentally, without any deliberate purpose on the part of the author: they are the product of his historical sense, as distinct from the special object and the large idea that he had before his mind in writing his Gospel. This special object and large idea presuppose the title as it were full-blown. It was not to be expected that an evangelist sitting down to write towards the end of the first century should unwind the threads of the skein which, some fifty or sixty years before, had brought his consciousness to the point where it was. To him looking back, the evolutionary process was foreshortened; and we have seen that as a consequence he allowed the language that he used about the beginning of the ministry to be somewhat more definite than on strictly historical principles it should have been. That he should do so was natural and inevitable—indeed from the point of view of the standards of his time there was no reason why he should be on his guard against such anticipations. If we distinguish between the gradual unfolding of the narrative and the total conception present to the mind of the writer throughout from the beginning, we should say that this conception assumes for Christ the fullest significance of Divine Sonship.
More than this: we see, when we come to study the Gospel in detail, that the writer not only assumes the full idea of Sonship but has also dwelt upon it and thought about it and followed it out through all 210the logic of its contents. We may say that it is not only he that has done so but practically all the thinking portion of the Church of his time. We may see this from the comparison of St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews, not to speak of other New Testament writers. The Synoptists hardly come under the head of thinkers. They are content to set down facts and impressions without analysis and without reflection. But long before St. John sat down to write, those who really were thinkers had evidently asked themselves what was the meaning and what was the origin of that title ‘Son of God’ by which the Church was agreed to designate its Master. The more active minds had evidently pressed the inquiry far home. They did not stop short at the Baptism; they did not stop short at the Birth: they saw that the Divine Sonship of Christ stretched back far beyond these recent events; they saw that it was rooted in the deepest depths of Godhead. It is true both of St. Paul and of the Epistle to the Hebrews—that is, assuming that the Epistle to the Colossians is St. Paul’s—that they have not only the doctrine of the Son but the doctrine of the Logos, all but the name.
Now I know that there are many who will not agree with me; I know also that the position is not easy to prove, though, as we shall see, I believe that there are a number of definite facts that at least suggest it. But for myself I suspect so strongly as to be practically sure that in these processes of thought the apostolic theologians, as we may call them, were not altogether original. 211They were not without a precursor; they did not invent their ideas for the first time. I believe that we shall most reasonably account for the whole set of phenomena if we suppose that there had been intimations, hints, Anhaltspunkte, in the discourses of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. We have as a matter of fact such hints or intimations in the Fourth Gospel. The Evangelist may have expanded and accentuated them a little—he may have dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s—but I believe that it is reasonable to hold that they had been really there. The Founding of Christianity is in any case a very great phenomenon; and it seems to me simpler and easier, and in all ways more probable, to refer the features which constitute its greatness to a single source, to the one source which is really the fountain-head of all. Without that one source the others would never have been what they were.
The fact that St. Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews had substantially arrived at a Logos doctrine before any extant writing has mentioned the name, seems to throw light on the order of thought by which the Fourth Evangelist himself arrived at his doctrine of the Logos. It is the coping-stone of the whole edifice, not the foundation-stone. It is a comprehensive synthesis which unites under one head a number of scattered ideas. From this point of view it would be more probable that the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel was a true preface, written after the rest of the work to sum up and bind together in one mighty paragraph the ideas that are really leading ideas, though scattered 212up and down the Gospel. Whether it was actually written last does not matter. What I mean is that the philosophic synthesis of the events recorded in the Gospel came to the Evangelist last in the order of his thought; the order was, history first and then philosophic synthesis of the history. No doubt the synthesis was really complete before the Apostle began to write his Gospel; the writing of the Prologue may or may not have followed the order of his thought. It may have been, as Harnack thinks, a sort of commendatory letter sent out with the Gospel; or it may be that the Gospel was written out in one piece upon a plan present from the first to the writer’s mind. The order of genesis and the order of production do not always coincide; and it is really a very secondary consideration whether in any particular instance they did or not.
We do not know exactly at what stage in his career the Evangelist grasped the idea of the Logos. We should be inclined to think comparatively late, from the fact that it has not been allowed to intrude into the historical portion of the Gospel. The various ideas which are summed up under the conception of the Logos appear there independently and in other connexions. As we have just seen, in St. Paul also and in the Epistle to the Hebrews the arch is fully formed before the key-stone is dropped into it.
Whatever we may think about this, there is a close parallelism between the whole theology, including the Christology, of St. Paul and St. John. Both start from the thought of an Incarnation (John i. 14; Rom. viii. 3; Gal. iv. 4; Phil. ii. 7, 8; Col. i. 15; and with the latter 213part of the same verse, cp. Col. i. 19; ii. 9). In both St. John and St. Paul the union of the Son with the Father is not only moral but a union of essential nature (cp. John i. 1, 2, 14; x. 30, 38; xiv. 10, 11, 20; xvii. 21, 23 with 2 Cor. v. 19; Col. i. 13, 15, 19; ii. 9). Between the Son and the Father there is the bond of mutual love, of a love supreme and unique (that is the real meaning of μονογεν?? in John i. 14, 18; cp. xvii. 23, 24, 26 and Rom. viii. 3, 32; Eph. i. 6; Col. i. 13). As a consequence of this relation between the Son and the Father, which has its roots in the eternal past (John i. 1, 2; xvii. 5, 24), there was also complete union of will in the work of the Son upon earth (John v. 30; vi. 38; xiv. 31; xvii. 16: cp. Phil. ii. 8; Heb. v. 7, 8). Thus the acts of the Son are really the acts of the Father, the natural expression of that perfect intimacy in which they stand to each other (v. 19, 20; viii. 29; x. 25, 37, 38). The reciprocity between them is absolute, it is seen in the perfection of their mutual knowledge (vii. 29; viii. 19; x. 15; xvii. 25); so that the teaching of the Son is really the teaching of the Father (vii. 16; viii. 26, 28, 38; xii. 49, 50; xiv. 10, 24; xv. 15). What the Son is, the Father also is. Hence the life and character and words of the Son, taken as a whole, constitute a revelation of the Father such as had never been given before (vi. 46; xiv. 7-10: cp. i. 14, 18)[64].
Thus we are brought to another central idea of the Fourth Gospel, the function of the Son as revealing 214the Father. For this, again, we have a parallel in an impassioned passage of St. Paul:
‘The god of this world hath blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should not dawn upon them. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. Seeing it is God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. iv. 4-6).
It may be true that this idea, though central with St. John, is subordinate with St. Paul; but it is distinctly recognized—just as, conversely, the doctrine of the Atonement, though clearly implied, is less prominent with St. John than with St. Paul.
The close resemblance between the teaching of St. John and St. Paul does not end with the exposition of the character and mission of the incarnate Son; it is exhibited no less in what is said about the Holy Spirit. The teaching of the Fourth Gospel on the subject of the Spirit repeats in a remarkable way certain leading features in its teaching about the Son. The Father is in the Son (as we have seen), and the Son is one with the Father; and yet the Son is distinct (in the language of later theology, a distinct Person) from the Father; and in like manner the Paraclete is ‘another’ than the Son (xiv. 16), and is sent by the Son (xv. 26; xvi. 7); and yet in the coming of the Spirit the Son Himself returns to His people (xiv. 18; cf. iii. 28).
Here again the parallel is quite remarkable between 215St. Paul and St. John. If we take a passage like Rom. viii. 9-11 we see that, in this same connexion of the work of the indwelling Spirit among the faithful, He is described at one moment as the Spirit of God, at another as the Spirit of Christ, and almost in the same breath we have the phrase, ‘If Christ is in you’ as an equivalent for ‘If the Spirit of Christ is in you.’ The latter phrase is fuller and more exact, but with St. Paul, as well as with St. John, it is Christ Himself who comes to His own in His Spirit.
No writer that I know has worked out the whole of this relation with more philosophical and theological fulness and accuracy than Dr. Moberly in his Atonement and Personality. And I am tempted to quote one short passage of his (where I should like to quote many), because it seems to me to sum up in few words the fundamental teaching of St. Paul and St. John.
‘Christ in you, or the Spirit of Christ in you; these are not different realities; but the one is the method of the other. It is in the Person of Christ that the Eternal God is revealed in manhood to man. It is in the Person of His Spirit that the Incarnate Christ is Personally present within the spirit of each several man. The Holy Ghost is mainly revealed to us as the Spirit of the Incarnate[65].’
It is to the language of St. Paul and St. John that we go for proof that the Holy Spirit is a Person; but it is also from their language that we learn how intimately He is associated with the other Divine Persons.
We are led up to what is in later theological language 216called the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is well known that some of the most important data for this doctrine are derived from the Fourth Gospel, especially from the last discourse. And whatever is found in St. John may be paralleled in substance from St. Paul.
3. Comparison with the Synoptic Gospels.
 
Now I am not going to maintain that, if one of us had been an eye-witness of the Life of Christ, the profound teaching of which I have just given an outline would have seemed to him to bear the same kind of proportion to the sum total of His teaching that it bears in the Fourth Gospel. By the essential conditions of the case it could not be so. It is this particular kind of teaching which the Evangelist specially wishes to enforce; and, in order to enforce it, he has singled out for his narrative just those scenes in which it came up—those and, broadly speaking, no others.
We have seen that in regard to this teaching there is a very large amount of coincidence between St. Paul and St. John. We shall have presently to consider what is the nature and ground of this coincidence, how it arose and what relation it implies between the two Apostles. But before going on to this, we must first ask ourselves how far it can be verified by comparison with the Synoptic Gospels. It is right to look for such verification, however much we may be convinced that these Gospels are an extremely partial and fragmentary representation of all that Christ said and did. Even a modern biography, 217contemplated perhaps during the life-time of its subject, and actually begun soon after his death, will only contain a tithe (if he is a really great man) of his more significant acts and sayings. But those who attempted to write what we wrongly call Lives of Christ did not, as it would seem, for the most part even begin to do so or make preparations for beginning for some thirty years after the Crucifixion, when the company of the apostles and intimate disciples was already dispersed, or at least in no near contact with the writers[66]. We have only to ask ourselves what we should expect in such circumstances. And I think we should find that our expectations were fully borne out if we were to compare together the contents of the oldest documents, those of the Logia with the Mark-Gospel, and those of the special source or sources of St. Luke with both. The amount and value of the gleanings which each attempt left for those who came after tells its own story.
But if we do not expect that the Synoptic Gospels would be in the least degree exhaustive in the materials they have preserved for us from the Life of Christ, we might be sure that their defects would be greatest in regard to the class of teaching with which we are at present concerned. It is teaching of a kind that might perhaps haunt the minds of a few gifted 218and far-sighted individuals, but would certainly fall through the meshes of the mind of the average man. It was this very fact, as we have seen, which prompted the Fourth Evangelist to write his Gospel. The externals of the Lord’s Life he recognized as having been adequately told; but it was just the profoundest teaching and some of the most significant acts that had escaped telling, and that he himself desired to rescue from oblivion.
We must therefore be content if we can verify a few particulars. We must not from the outset expect to be able to do more. And we must be still more content if these particulars show by their character that they are fragments from a much larger wreckage, that they are what we might call chance survivals of what had once existed on a much larger scale.
We concluded our sketch of the Christology of the Fourth Gospel by speaking of the data which it contained for the doctrine of the Trinity. These however are only data. It is perhaps a little surprising that the only approach to a formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity occurs not in St. John but at the end of the Gospel of St. Matthew (xxviii. 19). I am of course well aware that this part of the First Gospel is vigorously questioned by the critics. I am prepared to believe myself that the passage is a late incorporation in the Gospel; and antecedently I should not say that we had strong guarantees for its literal accuracy. But then—this is an old story, so far as I am concerned, and I must apologize for introducing it, but I cannot leave the point unnoticed—how are 219we to explain that other remarkable verse that occurs at the end of the second Epistle to the Corinthians (2 Cor. xiii. 14)? This familiar three-fold benediction must have had antecedents; it must, I should say, have had a long train of antecedents. The most adequate explanation of it seems to me to be that the train of antecedents started from something corresponding, something said at some time or other, in the teaching of our Lord[67]. I fully believe that the hints and intimations of a Trinity that we find scattered about the New Testament have their origin ultimately in the teaching of Christ. Apart from this, how could the conception have been reached at so early a date? For 2 Corinthians must in any case fall between 53-57 A.D.[68]
Let us work our way backwards through another of the hints. We have seen that the coming of the Paraclete is described in the Fourth Gospel as a return of Christ to His own. Are there any 220parallels for this in the Synoptic Gospels? Not exactly, because the two things are not brought into combination. But we have on the one hand distinct predictions of the activity of the Holy Spirit after the departure of Christ. For instance:
‘When they deliver you up, be not anxious how or what ye shall speak.... For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you’ (Matt. x. 19, 20).
And in St. Luke’s version of the promise as to answers to prayer, the Holy Spirit is spoken of as imparted to the believer:
‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?’ (Luke xi. 13).
The gift of the Holy Spirit in connexion with prayer is one of the topics in the Last Discourse as recorded by St. John. On the other hand there are in the Synoptics remarkable allusions to the continued presence of Christ with His people. Such is that which follows immediately upon the ve............